The software industry's low barrier to entry facilitates strong competition in the marketplace between software development companies. In order to be successful, most software development companies strive to produce high-quality and error-free software. Because the user interface of a software application is typically the most visible aspect of a software application, software development companies may devote significant resources to performing thorough quality-assurance reviews of user interfaces.
Unfortunately, a thorough quality-assurance review of a software application's user interface may be expensive, requiring many man-hours to review each aspect of the user interface in its various states. In order to increase both the efficiency and thoroughness of a quality-assurance review of a user interface, some software development companies may use a partially automated review process. For example, a quality assurance tool may automatically interact with the user interface, guiding the user interface through its various states. The quality assurance tool may further capture a screenshot of the user interface at each step of the interaction, so that a quality assurance employee or other user may inspect the user interface at that step to find any display glitches, errors, or other defects.
However, this partially automated review process may still be inefficient. For example, some of the screenshots of a user interface in its various stages may be identical, such that a review of more than one of these screenshots may be redundant. Similarly, some elements of the screenshots of the user interface (e.g., text contained within the screenshot) may be identical, such that quality-assurance reviews targeting those elements may also include redundancies. As such, the instant disclosure identifies a need for reducing the redundancies present in conventional quality-assurance reviews of graphical user interfaces.